Alexander McQueen’s Savagely Beautiful Brow: The Look of the Day in Paris

Savage Beauty. The name of the powerful Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, dedicated to the work of the late Alexander McQueen, came to mind at the sight of the thick, spiky, feathery strips that makeup artist Pat McGrath was attaching to the browbones of a few select models backstage before the fashion house’s fall runway show tonight. “We started with the idea of nature, a kind of owl eye, and then we began playing with the shape to make something very extreme, very punk,” she said of the fine, tufted plumes, which she and her team had hand-glued, one by one, into custom strips in anticipation of the runway; a softer, shorter set was also attached to the upper lashlines. One of two conceptual looks McGrath had created for designer Sarah Burton—the other was a futuristic metallic eye made from a mixture of burnished metallic pigments in burgundy, silver, and gold—it brought the season’s exaggerated lash mania to a memorable crescendo. Worn with backstage hairstylist Guido Palau’s braided cornrows, it was meant to capture a moment, said McGrath, of “innocence, romance, and darkness.” It did—and a highly memorable one at that.